Stirring simplicity marks crash site of Flight 93

Sunday

Sep 8, 2013 at 1:00 PM

Exactly one American flag flaps in the rural Pennsylvania breeze at the Flight 93 National Memorial.

By Josh NoelChicago Tribune

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. | Exactly one American flag flaps in the brisk, rural Pennsylvania breeze at the Flight 93 National Memorial, which is the same number you'll find at most other national parks and monuments. That lone flag makes the memorial at once confounding and stoically brilliant.Where there could be excess, the Flight 93 memorial exercises restraint. When it can aim for the heart, it heads for the mind. Instead of the sentimental, the memorial favors the spare.Such sacred American soil, where 40 innocents died after their hijacked airplane plunged into the edge of a hemlock grove on Sept. 11, 2001, easily could demand patriotic excess: gleaming statues, towering religious symbols and, perhaps, an endless stream of red, white and blue to remind us of the fortitude of the American spirit.Instead, the memorial gets out of its own way to let the strangely peaceful land – strange, at least, considering the catastrophe it witnessed – tell the story. What is required of a visitor is an open mind and quiet reflection. Through that come the horrific power and sadness of United Airlines Flight 93 plummeting 563 mph from the sky at a 40-degree angle and almost upside down to where you stand.It wasn't until the end of my three hours at the Flight 93 memorial, after examining every angle I could, that I realized how spare it truly was. There is none of the "Let's roll" chest thumping often associated with the tragedy – a reference to the passengers' trying to take control of the plane. I asked a park ranger if visitors ever ask for more: more flags, more drama, more everything."Yup," she said. "Bigger and more."But simplicity is the root of the memorial's power, and it is in part because of that simplicity that orienting to the memorial can be difficult.Visitors arrive at a series of panels in an outdoor plaza that explains the events of that day, when nearly 3,000 people died in four crashes of hijacked planes, including in New York and Washington. Some are instantly familiar, and others stir long-forgotten details. The most jarring is simply titled "The Crew and Passengers of Flight 93" and shows mostly smiling images of the crew and passengers. Staring into those small faces, I realized how little I knew about the victims. Most were from New Jersey. One was Japanese. One was German. One was pregnant. Not surprisingly, the hijackers aren't named anywhere at the monument.Beyond the signs is the memorial itself. It's not even necessarily clear as you are entering it because it is so simple – a quarter-mile black cement path jogging along the edge of the plane's debris field. The path happens to be broken into three legs, which serve a convenient purpose for acclimating to the space.The first segment allows us merely to understand where we are and to take in the broadness of the clean, pastoral land. After a slight turn, the second leg brings visitors to the closest point to the actual crash site – about 200 feet – which is marked by a 17-ton sandstone boulder taken from elsewhere on the land. The third brings us to a stirring conclusion: a white marble wall of panels bearing the names of the victims. Each name gets its own panel.Then comes an even more sobering realization: The wall runs below the plane's flight path as it sped to the ground.Standing beside that wall and dragging your fingers across the engraved names, it is impossible not to look into the bright Pennsylvania sky and imagine the plane hurtling toward Earth mere feet above.It's a horrifying and humbling reminder of how, among so many other truths, that day was grossly unfair. A day earlier or later, the 40 people on that plane likely would have been 40 different people.So, in essence, the memorial amounts to walking one-quarter of a mile along a black concrete path to a white marble wall. To your left is where the plane crashed. At first it looks like a landscape that can be processed in about 30 minutes, but in truth, it's worth walking that path and back two or three times. Each stroll makes the landscape increasingly familiar and powerful.It was during my last visit to the marble wall that I met Barbara Krah, 64, of nearby Saltsburg, Pa., who admitted that she at first didn't understand the memorial."But from every angle that you look at it, you can really relate," Krah said. "There's a feeling of awe, like if you've ever been to Pearl Harbor. It makes you wonder, ‘Could I have been that brave?'?"The memorial is only about one-third finished – a visitor center is expected to open in 2015 – but what has been constructed is quite enough to visit. Architect Paul Murdoch, whose firm was selected to create the memorial from 1,100 entries, said in an interview after my visit that he quickly decided his design would leave the overt narrative and symbolism for the forthcoming visitor center."That was very conscious," said Murdoch, president of Los Angeles-based Paul Murdoch Architects."It's not like you're on the Mall in Washington, D.C., commemorating something that happened elsewhere in the world. This landscape offers firsthand experience, and that allows the memorial to be spare in support of it."